Two Triangles within a Square #2
Robert Mangold
ROBERT MANGOLD, 1975. ACRYLIC AND COLORED PENCIL ON CANVAS.
An architect’s lines against a field of colour with hues so subtle it almost becomes transparent. Robert Mangold’s work takes the simplest formal objects, the base geometric shapes, and through subtle manipulation, makes us dwell on them. Working as a security guard at the MOMA in 1962, his colleagues were Robert Ryman, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin and Lucy Lippard, and he began to develop his abstract language. His career has been uncompromising and certain, developing a single theme for more than 50 years in various iterations, he stands amongst a small group who have been able to sustain their position. He relies on the intuitive, and the apparent reductiveness of his paintings gives way to a complex understanding of space. Painting is, for Mangold, “the most difficult art to grasp”. “If you come into a room where there’s an installation or a sculpture, you know to walk around it, it exists in your space with you; there’s no way to kill time in front of a painting.”